Report on International Conference on
Universal Knowledge and Language, 2002.
(http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in/icukl2002)
Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
.
Introduction
The International Conference on Universal Knowledge and Language (ICUKL2002) was held at the Beach Resort, Fort Aguada, Taj Goa from 25th to 29th November, 2002. It was co-organized by the Universal Networking Digital Language (UNDL) foundation Geneva, IIT Bombay and Transcultura Paris.
The universalizing trend in the social, economic, political and cultural environment is compelling all nations to search for reciprocal knowledge and transcultural understanding. These would hardly happen without bridging the gap between the local knowledge and universal knowledge and without crossing language barriers.
ICUKL2002 was unique in its scope. It was intended to be an occasion for reflecting on the interdependence of knowledge, culture and language from philosophical, social and engineering approaches. It was also intended to be an opportunity for learning and discussing specific issues concerning the Universal Networking Language (UNL)- which is a language for knowledge access and distribution on the internet- from the point of view of multilingual infrastructure and related linguistic and technological aspects.
The Programme was organized under the broad and provocative theme Universal Knowledge and was addressed from four interrelated perspectives: Philosophical, Cultural, Linguistic and Engineering. The theme invited papers and discussions on a variety of topics, including on the very concepts of universal knowledge and reciprocal knowledge.
The conference was chaired by Prof. M.G.K. Menon. The Advisory committee co-chairs were Prof. Della Senta, Director, UNDL foundation and Prof. Ashok Misra, Director, IIT Bombay. The Program committee was co-chaired by Dr. Hiroshi Uchida of UNDL foundation and Prof. Le Pichon of Transcultura. The co-conveners were Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya and Prof. G.V. Parbhu-Gaunkar of IIT Bombay.
ICUKL2002 was organized in two parts:
§ Transcultura Symposium
§ Knowledge and Language symposium
The former had 15 invited speakers– all eminent scholars from Europe and India in various disciplines like philosophy of language, linguistics and culture. The theme of this track was the exploration of the idea of Encyclopedia of Keywords.
The latter had 6 invited speakers from major speech and language processing groups of this country including Ministry of IT, IITs at Chennai, Mumbai and Kanpur, NCST, IIIT Hyderabad etc. The Technology Development in Indian Languages initiative too was presented. There was a special session on Konkani Languages. In this session were discussed the History of Konkani Language and efforts on Konkani corpus creation. The research tracks had 21 refereed papers covering the following topics:
§ UNL applications and tools
§ Machine translation and lexical resources
§ Information Retrieval in parallel with UNL enconverting workshop
§ Speech and visual information processing
The last day also featured a panel discussion titled creating universal knowledge across language barriers, chaired by Prof. M.G.K. Menon and participated in by Prof. P.V.S. Rao of TIL, India, Prof. J. P. Contzen of EU and Prof. Allan Le Pichon of Transcultura Paris. Additionally, posters of research papers and presentations were displayed prominently in the conference area for the whole duration of the conference.
ICUKL2002 was truly international in character. The delegates for the conference came from all over India and from Russia, France, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Brazil, China, Japan and Indonesia. The fact that the theme of the conference was deemed important was apparent from the sponsorship received for the event. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and leading industries like TCS, Infosys, Xansa, Mahindra British Telecom, Salgaonkar and Bros. Ltd. and HP India afforded generous funding for the event. The Government of Goa assisted and supported the conference at every step providing finance, hosting events and giving cheap accommodation for the delegates. The Governor of Goa, Shri Kidarnath Sahani inaugurated the conference and the patron of the conference was the Chief Minister of Goa, Shri Manohar Prabhu Parrikar.
Invited speeches
The invited Speakers were all eminent scholars and experts from various disciplines. Prof. M. G. K. Menon, an eminent scientist and phillospher, spoke on the Implications of Information Technology for Diversity of Languages and Cultures touching upon a range of broad issues like the language barrier, the UNL project, the language policies and the deep impact of the internet on the languages. In his speech on knowledge management and linguistic pluralism, Mr. Rajeeva Ratna Shah, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, addressed the problem of transferring linguistic information and then gave an overview of the major language technology initiatives in the country. Dr. Om Vikas from the Ministry of Information Technology- who is the prime force behind the Technology Development in Indian Languages projects- gave a talk titled Annals of Indian Language Computing, in which he traced the history of Indian language computing endeavors.
Dr. Hiroshi Uchida, the architect of the UNL system, and Ms Meying Zhu and Dr. Ronaldo Martins- researchers from the UNDL Foundation- gave an exposition of the UNL system covering the basic constructs of the UNL, the knowledge base and the universal word lexicon. Prof. Gérard Chollet from the University of Paris talked about the use of UNL in key words, key-images and key-concepts in a transcultural setting. The speech on Building Infrastructure for machine translation research: an Indian Perspective by Prof. R.M.K. Sinha of IIT Kanpur dealt with the famous Anglabharati and Anubharati machine translation systems developed at IIT Kanpur. Prof. B. B. Choudhary of ISI Kolkata and of Indian lanaguage OCR fame described strategies for building Spell Checkers in Indian Languages. In his speech a common archchitecture for machine translation for Indian Languages, Prof. Rajeev Sangal, Director of IIIT Hyderabad, emphasized the need for building lexical resources, using machine learning techniques on corpora and touched upon the Anusaaraka project for MT among Indian Language and for between Indian Languages and English. Prof. B.Yegnanarayana of Indian Institute of Technology Madras delivered an exposition on Speech technology in Indian context narrating his many years of work on speech recognition and generation. Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya of IIT Bombay talked on Interlingua Based Machine Translation and the Development of Lexical Resources describing his group’s research on tri-lingual MT system for English, Hindi and Marathi based on UNL and also the construction of the first wordnet in India for Hindi. Mr Walwalikar and Mrs. Madhavi Sardesia, linguist and littérateur of Goa, spoke on Konkani corpora development at Asmitai- an industry in Goa; the Konkani corpora is one of the best in the country today.
Eminent philosophers, linguists and social scientists also delivered speeches in the conference. Prof. Subhadra Joshi of University of Mumbai spoke on the Unversality of key concepts in Vedic tradition. Prof. Franson Manjali of JNU dwelt on time, discourse and transculturality. Mr. Uday Bhembre and Mrs Kiran Budkule, linguists and litterateurs of Goa, traced the history of the Konkani language and culture. The following speeches from Transcultura scholars were deeply appreciated by the participants:
§ Under the sky, a Chinese approach of "universality": Zhao Tingyang.
§ Strategy for Reciprocal Knowledge, Reciprocal anthropology and the question of universality or Key Words: Transcultural approach of universality and difference: Alain Le Pichon.
§ Project of a Transcultural Encyclopedia of Key words. Words' meanings can change: an example about marriage in French language history - methodological proposals: Pierre Varrod.
§ Zero as a key word for a transcultural approach to science: Jacques Vauthiers.
§ Keywords and key concepts in economy: a transcultural approach of globalisation: Gustavo Martin Prada.
§ The principle of mutual recognition in the E.U. economic policy- about different possible understandings of a key-concept: Fiorella Padoa.
§ Reciprocal Visions and Image Feedbacks: a visual experience of reciprocal anthropology in Amazonian cultures: Patrick Deshayes.
§ Distance Learning: a EU-India Perspective: G.V. Prabhu-Gaunkar and Allan Le Pichon.
Prof. P.N. Murthy, Tata Consultancy Services, Trivandrum spoke on language learning- a method of imparting reading capability prior to writing capability to an adult illiterate in the language spoken by him.
UNL Encoding Workshop
A highlight of the conference was a half-day workshop on encoding conventions in UNL, which Prof. Igor Boguslavsky of UNL-Russia Center led. Prof. Christian Boitet of UNL-France center, Prof. Irina Prodanoff of UNL-Italy center, Dr. Ronaldo Martins of UNDL Foundation and Mrs Shashi Palekar and Mr. Salil Barodekar of UNL-India center gave presentations on UNL representation, language independence, lexicon, language divergence and such other deep computational linguistics issues.
Conclusions
Several important conclusions were reached at the end of the conference. It was decided that
§ To spread the awareness of the UNL system, a summer school will be held in IIT Bombay, in which NLP researchers from educational institutions and industries of India will participate. The lectures and the hand-on will be delivered by the researchers from UNDL foundation and IIT Bombay.
§ The Konkani corpus will be stored in IBM PC format and will be processed for various frequency information. This is turn will be used for Konkani lexicon, Konkani morphology, Konkani wordnet and Konkani machine translation software.
§ The next conference on universal knowledge and language will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.
§ The Keyword Extraction project of Transcultura will explore the possibility of using UNL.
§ The effort on creating lexical resources like machine readable dictionaries, wordnets and ontologies will be encouraged and intensified.
Newspaper coverage
Times of India
Goa governor calls nations to be partners in progress Tuesday, November 26, 2002.
The Navhind Times
Goa to host global meet on languages Friday, November 8, 2002.
Meet on knowledge and language from Nov 25 Monday, November 18, 2002.
Global networking for Konkani Thursday, November 28, 2002.
The Economic Times
Process on to Create First Wordnet in Hindi Tuesday, November 26, 2002.